The King of Pain

I don’t get why this novel is meant to be funny, I didn’t get that from it at all. It is however a very good and well crafted read. The story alternates between Rick’s thoughts while he is trapped under a large piece of furniture, and stories he reads from a book about prisons. Novels with this kind of structure can often be frustrating, switching back and forth between the “bad” boring bits and the actual action, but this wasn’t the case at all with this one. The prison stories were mostly very interesting, and uncannily relevant to Rick’s predicament, and the moments Rick shared with us in between were also intriguing and gripping. I was very impressed with the ability of the author to keep me gripped in a plot which basically reads “man gets stuck under heavy furniture, reads a book about prisons whilst awaiting rescue” !